Julian Sands smacks of a head boy delivering an earnest sixth-form lecture in
A Celebration of Harold Pinter at Pleasance Courtyard, says Dominic
Cavendish.

What is it about those Merchant-Ivory idols of the 1980s? Rupert Graves, Hugh Grant, and now, look, Julian Sands – none of them seem to hit middle-age like the rest of us, retaining a Dorian Gray-like capacity to keep spookily smooth-featured.

Standing square-jawed, blond and tall in the dead centre of the Pleasance’s main-stage, as though ready for all comers at the stumps, Sands – who has been long lost to LA – looks like the golden head boy of a particularly well-bred public school.

Unfortunately both the manner and accompanying matter of this “Celebration of Harold Pinter”, which sifts through Pinter’s poetry back-catalogue with blanket reverence, smack too much of an earnest sixth-form lecture – one delivered by a prize pupil in honour of a formidable, life-changing teacher.

Sands – directed with only the most minimal nod to variety of pace and diction by John Malkovich – has weirdly adopted his master’s voice for the occasion (or can it be that two men, generations apart, can share the same uncanny timbre?): rasping, emphatic, hard.

Sands believes Pinter’s poetry alone would have secured him a place in the annals. Having listened to his selection – some of which combines flat writing and megaphone bombast to such an extent that even a Private Eye spoof would be redundant – it’s hard to share anything like that opinion.

Pronouncements from other works – “My writing life has been, quite simply, one of relish, challenge and excitement” – are served up like gospel truths. And Sands, who advises, for instance, that it’s “essential” to have Pinter’s poetry and prose beside our beds, piles on the lack of self-irony.

True, we get some jibes at the expense of dear old Harold and his irascible temper – but, in common with the oration as a whole, they only compound the sense of a worthy-minded project painting itself into the wrong Pinter corner.